I have updated Picasa extension for BlogEngine.NET 2.0. If you haven’t use it before, take a look at instructions here, the way it works didn’t change much. I made it better match new admin UI, but functionality stays very much the same. More...

Go to hosting dashboard/content/IIS management and click “create” link. This is an interface GoDaddy provides you to create virtual directory for your ASP.NET application. Give a name for directory and don’t forget to check “set application root” – this is akin to “configure virtual directory as application” in IIS world, and this is exactly what we doing - installing ASP.NET application. More...

BlogEngine 2.0 is .NET 3.5 application, but you can use it with .NET framework 4.0 with little effort by compiling source code as .NET 4.0 assembly. You can do it with free Visual Web Developer Express 2010 which can be downloaded as stand alone or installed with MS web platform installer, whichever you prefer. Here is short walk through. More...

In this part we'll get menu working. BlogEngine supports “pages” – pages are different in that they don’t belong to post list, don’t support comments and can have parent/child relationship. In short, this is a way to turn your blog into CMS (content management system) or combine blog and CMS on the same site. BlogEngine has page list widget that shows list of all pages on the site. It is a simple flat list and does not support nesting, that is why a while back I wrote this control to extend standard list to hierarchical unsorted HTML list that can be styled with CSS to look as horizontal or vertical menu usually used in CMS-style websites. More...

This is part 3 of converting theme to BlogEngine tutorial. In the first part we created a new theme and added HTML/CSS/JavaScript from chosen design template. Second part mostly dealt with customizing search. Today is going to be a widgets day.

Widgets are parts of the site that can be dynamically configured and updated by admin, usually you can see them in the side bar, like list of categories, tags etc. It is one of the main extensibility points in BlogEngine and can be very powerful, although you should not overuse it as having too many widgets can slow site down. More...

This is a second in the series of tutorials on theme building with BlogEngine (go to part one). This time I’ll get search functionality up and running. BlogEngine has search widget and server-side control to add search really easy to the blog, but for some themes it does not fit well with design and you want to go manual. Fortunately, it is not hard. More...

With summer behind us, you might want to change things a little bit to celebrate a new season. Like buy a new shoes or, may be, change a theme on the blog. I decided to do the later. My schedule is quiet busy, so I’ll do it in several steps and will share tips, tricks and findings with anybody interested.I’m running relatively recent build of BlogEngine from source, but new theme should work fine with 1.6.x.x. Let me know if it doesn’t for you and I’ll do adjustments as needed. To start, I went looking for catchy free theme, no kind in particular - any design can be adopted to BlogEngine pretty easily. This WP theme looked pretty good to me. Below I’ll try to document adoption process step by step. More...

BlogEngine is a CodePlex-based project and uses Mercurial as source control. Most of described below equally applied to any CodePlex project that uses Mercurial. Here is step-by-step what you need to do to share your code on CodePlex. More...

Few people mentioned that my FlickrBar widget for BlogEngine.Net got out of sync with Widgets framework after framework got interface change. I have updated widget to work with latest releases including 1.6.0 and 1.6.1, you can download it using link below. Instruction on how to use are dead simple: move files in the corresponding location and widget will pop up as an option in the zone dropdown. Go to “edit” and enter what kind of photos you want streamed down to your blog, set number of photos to display, may be change CSS (for example, use “padding:2px” to get gaps between pictures). You can see end result on the right side bar in my blog.

Sorry about post title, could not resist :) You probably saw these "new" and "hot" links next to list items all over the place. Something was added or updated and it makes sense to put an indicator that clearly shows this. I wanted to do it for list of extensions on BlogEngine site, so that when something new added anyone could see it right away, because list is pretty large. And I don’t want to maintain it afterwards, that image should go away when it is not “hot” anymore, all by itself. How hard is this with BlogEngine and .NET? Walk in the park: More...